Francis Story The Search for the Self

The search for Self is vain, because it is a search for something that does not exist except as a mythical concept which has had to be taken into the structure of language by common assent. If it is used in any other way than as a fictitious convenience - if it is taken as meaning something real and enduring - it cannot be anything but a stumbling-block to the development of right understanding.

UK Parliamentary Human Rights Group said the prospect for free and fair general elections in Bangladesh is looking bleak with only a month to go before the caretaker government takes office.

Lord Avebury, vice-chair of the group, made the comment while chairing a seminar on 'Bangladesh: Logjam on the Road to Free and Fair Elections' in the House of Lords on September 27.

"The US National Democratic Institute (NDI) has already referred to the incompetence and bias of the Election Commission (EC), all four of whose members were previously activists of parties belonging to the coalition government," a House of Lords press release from London said.

Referring to the manipulation in preparing the recent voters list, Lord Avebury said, "This is mass-produced fraud which must be exposed and corrected. The NDI commented on the 'rampant and escalating violence' of recent times, including the assassination of former finance minister Shah AMS Kibria, the attempt on the life of British High Commissioner Anwar Choudhury; the multiple grenade attack on the Leader of the Opposition Sheikh Hasina, the suicide bombing of two judges, and the simultaneous explosion of 500 bombs all over the country in August 2005.

In addition, he also mentioned about 800 people killed by the Rapid Action Battalion forces during encounters and shootouts, but not a single person has been captured or injured in those incidents.

Avebury also criticised last month's escalation of violence by the police against political demonstrators that left Saber Hossain Chowdhury, political adviser to Sheikh Hasina, and two other lawmakers -- Asaduzzaman Noor, and Mohammed Nasim -- injured.

"We are preparing to submit formal complaints on their behalf to the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union," he said.

Referring to the attacks on two women leaders -- Motia Chowdhury and Advocate Shaira Khatun injured in police attack on September 12 -- the Lord said, "It may be that we can also get the material for a complaint to the UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women."

Eminent jurist Dr Kamal Hossain, who also addressed the seminar in the House of Lords, said, "The current regime of BNP-Jamaat is blatantly involved in engineering every election mechanism to ensure victory at the next election."

Referring to the curtailment in police training period, Dr Kamal said, "Recently appointed police officers, most of whom were activists of the youth wing of the ruling BNP and of their coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami, were responsible for carrying out assaults on opposition leaders."

Kamal also questioned the rise of the number of voters in the voter list prepared by the regime from 70 million to 93 million within the last five years.

He said, "Free and fair election is not a matter of choice. The government has to uphold the rule of law in order to ensure free and fair elections."

The seminar was also attended by representatives of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Survival International, International Crisis Group, International Bangladesh Foundation, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Commonwealth Secretariat, Bangladesh High Commission to UK, Hudson Institute USA and The Times Newspaper.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Lord Avebury, vice-chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, chairing a seminar on Bangladesh: logjam on the road to free and fair elections in Committee Room 3A, House of Lords, September 27, 2006 at 11.00, said:

With only a month to go before the caretaker government takes office for the period leading up to the elections in January 2007, the prospects for free and fair elections in Bangladesh are looking bleak.

The US National Democratic Institute has already referred to the incompetence and bias of the National Electoral Commission, all four of whose members were previously activists of parties belonging to the coalition government. After being ordered to compile a new voters’ register based on a house-to-house canvass, the EC has come up with a list containing 11 million more names than there were on the 2001 register plus the young people who reached the age of 18 during those years. But there are also millions of eligible voters who haven’t been canvassed or recorded. This is mass-produced fraud in the making, which must be exposed and corrected.

I am glad to see that the prospects for a dialogue between government and opposition on electoral reforms have brightened, and I hope they can be widened to include the manipulation of the retirement age of judges, to secure the appointment of a former BNP activist, Justice K M Hasan, as head of the caretaker government. The BNP say that he was never criticised for bias as a supreme court judge, and if he had got to the top position by a normal process of succession, perhaps his party political past would have been less controversial. But he stands at the apex of a system of manipulation and violence designed to keep the coalition in power. How much of this can be dismantled, so late in the day, and is there the will to reverse the politicisation of the EC, police, army and administration?

And that’s not all. The NDI commented on the ‘rampant and escalating violence’ of recent times, including the assassination of Shah AMS Kibria, a former Finance Minister; the attempt on the life of our High Commissioner; the multiple grenade attack on the Leader of the Opposition, Sheikh Hasina, which killed 24 people; the suicide bombing of two judges, and the simultaneous explosion of 500 bombs all over the country in August 2005.

In addition to those terrorist atrocities, 800 people have been killed by the ‘Rapid Action Battalion’ forces in encounters and shootouts, but not a single person has been captured or injured in those incidents. Last week the Home Minister Lutfozzaman Babar issued instructions to the police to wind up inquiries into the RAB killings before the caretaker government assumes office in a month’s time, making it virtually impossible for any prosecutions to be mounted against RAB officers.

And in the last month, there has been an escalation of violence by the police against political demonstrators, including the notorious attack on Mr Saber Hossain Chowdhury, Political and Organising Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, causing him injuries that were so severe that he had to come here to seek advice from a neurologist.

Two MPs were also badly injured in attacks by the police - Asaduzzaman Noor, and Mohammed Nasim. We are preparing to submit formal complaints on their behalf to the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. We also know of at least two women who suffered injuries at a demo on September 12: Mothia Chowdhury and Advocate Shaira Khatun, and it may be that we can also get the material for a complaint to the UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women. The police must have been given orders to target opposition leaders, as Amnesty International highlighted in a recent press release. The violence has got even worse since then, and I believe it is part of a deliberate campaign to incapacitating opposition leaders and activists in advance of the election.

There have been other sinister developments in the last month. 821 recently appointed police officers, whose basic training was curtailed so that they could be deployed during the caretaker administration, have now been appointed as sub-inspectors without the in-service 18 months’ training normally required for command posts. Most of the men were activists of the youth wing of the ruling BNP and of their coalition partner Jamaat-e-Islami, and some had been arrested for extremist activities including a bomb outrage. These are the men who will be responsible for law and order during the campaign, and the mayhem they will let loose on opposition candidates and activists can readily be imagined.

The NGO Affairs Bureau, which controls aid agency funds granted to Bangladeshi NGOs, has been established to financially strangle any independent NGOs which might blow the whistle on malpractices and violence, while at the same time the BNP and Jamaat are busy registering bogus election observation NGOs, whose verdict can be predicted in advance. Proshika, a secular development NGO which had attracted substantial foreign aid for their programmes including micro-credit and agriculture, was raided on September 9 and 180 of its staff arrested, effectively closing it down and causing losses of tens of thousands of pounds.

At the end of last week a European Union mission returned from Dhaka, where they were looking into the advisability, feasibility and usefulness of an EU observation of the election when the time comes. If they do send observers, they will be vetted for acceptability by the Secretary of the EC, a former Jamaat activist, and it will be interesting to see whether they accept that condition.

The Commonwealth Secretariat are also sending a pre-election assessment mission, if they can get the agreement of the authorities in Dhaka. An earlier attempt to send a mission in June had to be aborted because the BNP said that Ministers were too busy to receive them.

Unfortunately, the advice given by NGOs or intergovernmental bodies on clean elections will be ignored. The last thing the coalition want is a free election which they would almost certainly lose, and in the next three months there is likely to be a crescendo of violence and malpractice designed to ensure they stay in power. But its still important that friends of Bangladesh tell the world how the election is being hijacked, and send a message of solidarity to the democrats who are under siege.

Monday, September 25, 2006

In February, British Consul-General Stephen Bradley cryptically explained to readers of the South China Morning Post that "an anomaly that amounts to a piece of unfinished business" had resulted in 600 ethnic Indian holders of British National (Overseas) passports in Hong Kong being wrongly denied full British citizenship ("Indians in HK win the right to British passports", February 10). Home Office ministers subsequently made commitments to Parliament that extra resources were being allocated to this task, and that the average processing time for reconsiderations would take about five weeks.

Months after the matter has been officially clarified, why are so many wrongly refused applicants still waiting in limbo for their British citizenship to be granted? We were advised on September 14 by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that close to half of the reconsideration requests submitted between February and July were awaiting a decision. Of the decisions that were finalised in the same period, nearly 7 per cent of the citizenship certificates received in Hong Kong have had to be returned to Britain because they contained errors.

It is high time that Mr Bradley and his team finished this business. It is unfair and unreasonable to delay attempts by ethnic minorities to acquire full British citizenship. Some of these applicants have been patiently waiting for more than nine years. They are not, and should not be treated as, second-class citizens deserving second-class treatment.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Cynthia and Richard Cashore, our friends from Williamsburg, left us this morning after a whirlwind visit of two days, en route to Florence. Then Lindsay set off for Nottingham with a carload of JW's stuff, and his bicycle strapped on the back with a special harness. Half way up on the M1, harness and bicycle fell off. She stopped and rang the police, who said later that both had disappeared without trace. Then she ran into a monster traffic jam. And when she finally reached Nottingham she took ages to find JW's new house. So a journey that should have taken two and a half hours lasted seven hours, and she didn't set off on the return journey until 22.00!

Had a good talk with Maurice on Skype this evening, and also this afternoon with Victoria, who is getting into practice so that she can use Skype from Laos, Cambodia etc during the winter.

There are two more bouts of ping-pong to record, 1-1 and then 2-1 to me on Wednesday, so the final tally before he went back to Nottingham was 50-49 to JW.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

I expect you have seen the report of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) pre-election delegation to Bangladesh’s 2006/07 Parliamentary elections, published September 11 and available on their website www.ndi.org. Among their many disturbing findings, they reported evidence that the police react violently and disproportionately to public demonstrations, and as you know, there have been a number of examples only this month, highlighted by Amnesty International in their Press Release ASA 13/008/2006, Bangladesh: Police target outspoken opposition leaders and beat them violently (web.amnesty.org/library/print/ENGASA130082006).

Among those badly injured in these attacks was Mr Saber Chowdhury, Political and Organising Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, Sheikh Hasina, who has had to come to the UK for medical treatment. I met him this evening and he gave me an account of the circumstances in which he was attacked. The police barricaded the Mirpur Road near the Road No 27 intersection in Dhanmondi, to prevent demonstrators getting to the Election Commission Secretariat. Saber Chowdhury was in a small group of about twenty people separate from the crowd, and some 50 m from the barrier. They were doing nothing that would have justified the use of force, and some police were standing near them, taking no action. Then some other police in riot gear crossed from the other side of the barrier, and ran towards the group with batons drawn. The others in the group tried to protect Mr Chowdhury and when the police attacked, they suffered 17 head injuries and some broken bones. He was crouching in the middle of the group when one of the police shouted ‘We’ve got him’, and the TV picked that up. He received a kick in the abdomen, went down, and was repeatedly kicked and hit as he lay on the ground, until he lost consciousness. He was taken to hospital, then flown to Singapore, and finally to London, where he is being treated in King’s College Hospital for neurological problems arising from the blows to his head including abnormalities of vision which may, unhappily, be permanent.

There were many eye witnesses of the event, and sworn statements are available. However, there has been no investigation of the criminal misconduct be the police, and their repeated use of violence on other occasions since then indicates that their behaviour was not that of a few rogue officers, but a concerted policy ordered at very senior level. Will you please ask the Bangladesh government whether there is to be any inquiry into violence by the police? Will you also ask whether there is to be any investigation of the remarkable statistics of RAB operations, in which some 800 people have been killed, but not a single person has been injured or captured?

Over the last 4 ½ years, some 27,000 police have been recruited, entirely from the ranks of BNP and Jamaat activists, and the training period has been reduced to six months. When the caretaker government takes office at the end of October, the force will consist entirely of men loyal to the present coalition government, and the mayhem they will inflict on opposition candidates and supporters can readily be imagined.

The Saturday before last, there were mass arrests of some 180 staff employed by Proshika, an NGO which campaigns for human rights and women’s rights in particular, good governance, and democracy, allegedly on suspicion of their intention to take part in the 14-party opposition demonstration at the Prime Minister’s office on September 12. They apparently had no intention of participating in that event, but if they had, they wouldn’t have been committing any offence.

As you will recall, the Supreme Court ordered the Chief Electoral Commissioner (CEC) to prepare a new register, based on a house to house canvass. The CEC finally pretended to comply with this order, but there have been widespread protests from people who have not been enumerated. Nevertheless there are 11 million more names on the register than the number of eligible voters as calculated from the 2001 census. In one polling district, where there were 1,600 registered voters in 2001, there are 2,100 on the new register, but 1,200 of the people on the 2001 register have not been recorded.

In 2001 there was a computerised register, and the NDI have recommended that the register should be computerised now, and placed on the web so that voters could check that their names had been properly recorded. The reaction of the CEC to this and oter recommendations by the NDI was that Bangladesh is a sovereign country. The current Secretary of the EC is a Jamaat loyalist, who has just said that the EC are planning to regulate the work of both foreign and domestic observers, vetting them for acceptability and prohibiting them from making any public statements.

Apart from the CEC, other members of the EC are Hassan Mansuur, formerly Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, whose Minister is Begum Zia herself; Zakaria, a loyalist who served Ershad and Zia ur Rahman before taking office under the BNP, and a judge with known BNP sympathies. The game plan of the coalition may be to sack the CEC just before the caretaker government takes over, leaving the three remaining commissioners to run the Commission for the benefit of the coalition, but appearing to have made a concession to the universal criticism of the present CEC.

Another sinister development is that the NGO Affairs Bureau controls funds entering Bangladesh provided by aid agencies. This will enable the government to strangle financially any independent NGOs which might have been able to play a useful role in countering or exposing malpractices during the campaign

The NDI report makes a number of recommendations, providing others with a useful checklist for their own assessments of the state of readiness of Bangladesh for a free and fair electoral process. It will be interesting to compare their assessment and recommendations with those of the EU Mission, which has no doubt been informed by the EU Heads of Mission in Dhaka. I checked with the Commonwealth Secretariat today, and they are still planning an assessment mission, though no date for it has yet been agreed. Will you ask the Bangladesh government if they intend to respond to each of the NDI recommendations, or is the statement by the CEC the last word on the matter?

It certainly doesn’t appear that there is the remotest chance of the government, political parties and civil society working together to address deficiencies and build confidence in the electoral process as the NDI suggests. If this is to happen, it must be the government that takes the lead, by dealing promptly and effectively with the criticisms of the Electoral Commission and the Chief Electoral Commissioner in particular; by giving firm orders to the police on the use of minimum force at political demonstrations; by reining in RAB, and by creating the necessary conditions for dialogue with the opposition. We must take a firm line on these matters, if Bangladesh is not to become a failed state,

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Having been away for the best part of two weeks, I'm trying to catch up on paperwork.

Wrote to an offical at the Department of Health about further inquiries they had promised to make about the effect of the Data Protection Act on access to personal information by chaplains looking after prisoners who are transferred to special hospitals.

Wrote to the Cyprus High Commissioner about a case in the High Court between a Brit who bought some property in the Turkish-occupied part of northern Cyprus, and the former owner of the property, who was forced to leave when the Turks invaded in 1975.

Wrote to Patricia Scotland at the Home Office about the Prison Service's failure to establish effective arrangements for security vetting of prison chaplains. They keep losing the forms containing confidential information, and sometimes manage to spin the process out for over a year. Its a wonder they get anyone to volunteer.

Telephoned Monterrico Matals in Lima, Peru, to ask whether they were ready to accept a visit by a representatives of the Peru Support Group, of which I'm President. The three executives I asked to speak to were all in meetings, and none of them have returned my call.

Had time for ping-pong, 2-1 to JW, and yesterday it was 1-1. Cumulative score since my operation 48-46 to JW. He goes back to Nottingham to start his final year on Thursday, so we have probably come to an end of the competition until next spring.

English Heritage are to carry out excavations at Silbury Hill to find the 'invert level' of the Atkinson tunnel, beginning October 9 and talong about a week. The main work, decided following Skanska's seismological survey, will be carried out in 2007, see www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.5390. For general information on Silbury Hill see www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/ConWebDoc.4011

The photograph below was taken on May 17, 2004, when I was interviewed on the successful application to the Inspector against the designation of Silbury Hill as 'Open Access' under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. As the nominal owner of Silbury Hill, I was the only person who could lodge the appeal, though it was effectively supported by EH.

On Sunday we celebrated the 15th anniversary of the opening of the first Buddha Grove to be established in a British prison. There were more guests, officers and inmates there than at any of the previous anniversaries. The Ven Khemadhammo told the story of Angulimala, after whom the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy was named, and also the history of the first Buddha Grove, built by the prisoners themselves, and mainly by two of them who were doing ten and fifteen years respectively. The example of Angulimala, a murderer who became a monk, and that of the two prisoners who led the construction of the Buddha Grove, showed that people could and did change.

At the ceremony, the Ven Khemadhammo, Head of the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy, launched Let Go, a new organisation whose purpose is to help Buddhist ex-prisoners when they return to outside life. Bobby Cummines, the Chief Executive of Unlock, supported this initiative, and spoke eloquently of the debt he owed to the Ven Khemadhammo for helping him personally to change during his 13-year sentence. He also referred very kindly to my correspondence with him at that time.

For more information about Angulimala, see www.angulimala.org.uk/For Unlock, see unlock.org.uk/main.aspx

Monday, September 18, 2006

Blickling Hall, 'a sumptuous confection of local red brick and Ketton limestone, Dutch gables and turrets', was built between 1619 and 1626 by Sir Henry Hobart, a successful lawyer who invested in property (like other Norfolk men such as Sir Thomas Coke of Holkham and John Heydon of Baconsthorpe). His descendants, Earls of Buckinghamshire in the 18th century had 'Auctor pretiosa facit' as their family motto, the same as the Lubbocks. I wonder if this was a coincidence? The second Earl had only daughters, one of whom married the 6th Marquess of Lothian, so that Blickling came into the Kerr family. The 11th Marquess left the house and contents to the National Trust, which only left his descendants with a house in Scotland and Melbourne Hall. I lived in Melbourne in the 50s, and have fond memories of Marie Kerr, also of Howard and his wife Christina, who was Maurice's godmother.

Another daughter of the 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire married William Assheton Harbord, 2nd Lord Suffield, whose father was patron of one of the livings to which the Rev Henry Willis was appointed. He was thefather of Richard Lubbock (willis), who emigrated to Augusta, GA, in 1791. Most of the American Lubbocks are descended from him.

Lord Avebury, vice-chair of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, chairing a meeting on Eritrea at the Human Rights Center of Amnesty International at 17-25 New Inn Yard, London SE2A 3EA on September 18, 2006 at 17.00 said:

It is a matter of great regret to me that we need to be holding this meeting to discuss political and religious persecution in Eritrea, and the prolonged incommunicado detention of the victims. I was chair of the Eritrea Support Group in the 70s and 80s, when the people of Eritrea under Isaias Afewerke, now the President, were fighting their heroic war of liberation against the occupation by Ethiopia, and I remember well a visit to the front line just after the Ethiopian 6th offensive, when I met Comrade Isaias. I observed the successful referendum on independence in 1993, and I visited the front line during a lull in the war against renewed aggression by Ethiopia at the beginning of 2000. I have consistently upheld the findings of the international commission that was appointed with the agreement of both countries to solve their border dispute, and Eritrea’s right to insist that the international community carry that settlement into effect. The unnecessary war over the boundary led to the deaths of tens of thousands on both sides, the internal displacement on the Eritrean side of further tens of thousands, and the deportation from Ethiopia of 66,000 people of Eritrean origin.

With that background, I am extremely unhappy to acknowledge that the people of Eritrea have lost many of the freedoms they fought so hard to achieve. But the facts have to be faced. As Amnesty International have reminded us in the statement issued today, this is the fifth anniversary of the incommunicado detention of 11 former members of Parliament, 10 journalists, and hundreds of others, whose only crime was to call for democratic reforms. The MPs have been accused of treason, and the journalists labelled as spies and mercenaries, but none of the detainees have been charged in court, and none have had access to lawyers. In many cases, relatives don’t even know where they are detained.

In the case of the 11 MPs, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ rights found three years ago that Eritrea was in breach of four major Articles of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. They urged the government of Eritrea to release the detainees and grant them compensation. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, at its most recent meeting in May, condemned the incommunicado detention of the Members, and appealed to the African Union to do everything possible to secure their release. The case will be considered again at the IPU Assembly meeting in Geneva on October 16.

The persecution of worshippers belonging to non-registered churches, and particularly the Jehovah’s Witnesses, is of great concern. In 2005 I wrote four times to the Eritrean Ambassador about particular cases including 20 conscientious objectors to military service, who had been detained since September 24, 1994 without charge or trial, though the maximum sentence under the law for refusing military service is three years. I mentioned reports by Amnesty International that the authorities had taken to arresting the fathers, mothers and other relatives of young men reaching the age of 18 who failed to report for military service and holding them as hostages, the allegation that some detainees were held in metal shipping containers, and the lack of an inquiry into the alleged killing of over a dozen conscription evaders at the Adi Abeto army camp on November 54, 2004.

I also took up the severe restrictions on freedom of expression, highlighted by the US State Department in their report on Eritrea. The Committee to Protect Journalists had described Eritrea as the worst country in Africa for detaining journalists, and they have just now repeated their critique of what they describe as Eritrea’s ‘brutal crackdown on the independent press’. CPJ did manage to speak to a presidential spokesman, Yemane Gebremeskel, who said the 13 journalists detained without trial since they were arrested in 2001 were involved in ‘acts against the national interests of the state’, but gave no indication of what the evidence was. Unconfirmed reports posted on websites indicate that the journalists had been moved to a secret prison, where three of them had died. The CPJ have been no more successful than I have in getting answers from Eritrean diplomats or government officials in Asmara, and the same goes for the Foreign Office. Ministers tell me that they continue to monitor human rights and religious freedoms in Eritrea closely, and raise their concerns with the Eritrean government whenever possible. But they appear to rely, as we do, on the reports of Amnesty International, the CPJ, and the international representatives of persecuted religious minorities.

I certainly think the Eritreans would get more active support from democratic states than they do in their just cause against Ethiopia if they took positive steps in the direction of freedom and the rule of law, in the name of which presumably they were fighting over the thirty years of the liberation war. Replacing the oppression of Addis Ababa with the home-grown dictatorship of the former hero of the independence struggle was not the objective for which a generation sacrificed their lives. Nor is it consistent with the statement by the Commission for Africa, which nobody has challenged, that ‘the issue of goof governance’’’ lies at the core of Africa’s problems’. There is huge potential in Eritrea, based on the ingenuity and tenacity of its people, and even more so that the rest of Africa, it could have today its best opportunity for change for decades. But it reminds me of the question about the number of psychiatrists needed to change a light bulb. The answer is one, but he has to be willing to change. I hope that Isaias is willing, and that he will listen to the message being sent by the true friends of Eritrea meeting tonight.

The Heydon memorial, in St Mary's Church, Baconsthorpe, commemorates Sir William Heydon and his wife, facing south rather than east, probably because the memorial was originally in the chancel before being moved to the window at the east end of the south aisle. Sir William was a later generation than Sir Henry, my 14G granfather, whose daughter Bridget married Sir William Paston in 1495

Thank you for your letter of September 7 about the Government’s approach to alcohol misuse. You don’t mention my letter to the Home Secretary of June 25, in which I asked him about his plans for compulsory rehabilitation of drinkers who commit violent crimes, reported in The Observer of June 25, and I enclose a copy for ease of reference. It would be much appreciated if I could have an answer, particularly as the targeted screening and brief interventions, and the possible dedicated referrals for offenders you now refer to in your current letter would increase the demand for alcohol rehabilitation services.

The Government had made no additional funding available to the NHS for this purpose under the Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy, and the £15 million extra you now say is available to Primary Care Trusts from 2007/08 on top of the present £217 million, a mere 6.9%, would represent a trivial increase in real terms after taking into account wage inflation. How much of the £15 million do you estimate is required for the targeted screening and brief interventions, or is there some other money for that purpose? What are the ‘new initiatives to help people who are damaging their health through alcohol abuse’, and do you really think £3.2 million is a sum proportionate to the cost of misuse to society? Is any of the £15 million or the £3.2 million going to be earmarked for services to prisoners, a high proportion of whom are serving sentences for crimes that are connected with alcohol misuse?

On the taxation of alcohol, you repeat the mantra that the Government does not regard this, by itself, as an adequate way to deal with alcohol abuse. Nobody has ever suggested that taxation should be the only means of dealing with the problem, but I certainly challenge your ex cathedra assertion that other instruments such as social legislation and self-regulation are more effective. What evidence do you have for that statement? If the aim is to reduce consumption – and this paragraph of your letter now appears to accept this objective – the social legislation required might have to be quite drastic, as in Finland, for example, and I suggest it would be far more difficult to persuade the British electorate to accept Scandinavian-type restrictions on alcohol, than to apply the price mechanism which they have been used to in previous years.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has now weighed in with a recommendation that it would be irresponsible to reject. They show that alcohol consumption rose by 20% between 1998 and 2002, from 9.7 to 11.7 litres of pure alcohol per person per year [Pathways to Problems, para 2.26], while among young people aged 16-19, the proportion of males drinking over 50 units a week increased by 80% between 1992 and 2002, and of females, the increase was 400% {para 2.29]. The ACMD say that ‘there is very strong evidence that increasing the price of alcohol reduces consumption overall and may have a disproportionately large effect on consumption by young people’. They recommend that the Government should seriously consider progressively raising the excise duty on alcohol, and this has to mean that it should be raised by an amount sufficient to make alcohol expenditure form a higher proportion of people’s average disposable incomes. What is your answer to their evidence-based proposal?

I am interested to learn that DH officials have participated in working groups preparing the European Union Alcohol Strategy which is to be published next month, but what policies have we been recommending to our EU partners? Will you please lodge copies of the papers we have presented at these working groups in the Library of the House of Lords?

In my letter of July 1, I drew attention to the evidence in the IC Report that the alcohol problem is worse in some other EU member states than in Britain, and suggested that European policy should be to align duties on alcohol upwards throughout Europe. May I please have your comments on that proposal?

From the statistics available to the ACMD, the Government’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy has not achieved the long term aim of reducing the harms caused by alcohol, and as you know perfectly well, ACPO has said that it is far too early to say whether the extension to the licensing hours has had a positive or negative impact on crime and disorder. It is therefore quite unjustifiable for you to couple the reductions in alcohol-related violent crime figures with the Licensing Act, as you do in your final paragraph. Please take heed of the admonition by Chris Allison, ACPO lead on Licensing, in the Press Release, Reference 109/06 of August 2, 2006, ‘ACPO LINE ON THE LICENSING ACT’, that ‘it will be at least a year before we can measure the true impact of the Act, and stop making any claims until you have the evidence.

I did ask the Home Secretary, in my letter of August 2, copy also attached for the web reference of the site where the parameters to be used in the assessment of five areas in which extensions of hours had been granted, and five other control areas in which the hours are unchanged, are being recorded, and I repeat this request.

You say that it would not be practicable to replicate the detailed analysis of the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report on an annual basis, as I suggested (not for the first time) in my letter of August 2, copy also attached. On what other basis do you suggest that the public might assess the overall success of your Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy? Rather than focusing entirely on binge drinking, on which, I reiterate, the ACPO jury is out, lets take the Information Centre for Health and Social Care’s statistics on hospital admissions where there was either a primary or a secondary diagnosis of selected alcohol-related disease as a representative index of alcohol-related harm, referred to in my letter of July 1, but on which you make no comment. [www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/alcoholeng2006/alcoholstatsncopyright/file, Statistics on alcohol, 2006, the Information Centre, June 30, 2006, Table 5.2, p 51] This figure increased from 88.6 thousand in 2000/01 to 126.3 thousand in 2004/05, an increase of 44.25%, and if the cost of alcohol harm went up by that amount since the Interim Analytical Report, it would now have reached £28.5 billion. The outcome of your Government’s so-called Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy would be an increase in the level of harm costing the nation £8.5 billion. I am sure you will have arguments to show that hospital admissions cannot be taken as an index of alcohol harm, but if that is your case, you have an obligation to construct a representative index that will allow the public to judge the success or failure of your policies. Please do so.

Letter to the Minister about the detention of breastfeeding mothers. I would have posted the Minister's letter to which this is the reply, but Blogger doesn't accept .tif files generated by IrfanView.From Lord Avebury P0616094

Tel 020-7274 4617Email ericavebury@gmail.com

September 16, 2006

Dear Mr Byrne,

Thank you for your letter of September 8, about the case of Mrs Gulten Pirbudak, which I have just seen on returning from holiday.

First, I would hope that whenever you receive a letter from a Peer or an MP, the case in question would need to be examined, and I don’t accept that it was reasonable for this process to take four months.

Second, in Mrs Pirbudak’s account of what happened at Communications House, she says that she repeatedly told the officer that she was breast feeding her son, and after a while this became obvious because her breasts were leaking, a fact that she says was remarked on by officers. You say the IND has no record of Mrs Pirbudak advising them that she was breast feeding her son, and I would be grateful if you would obtain whatever record was made of the interview and let me have a copy. If indeed it doesn’t refer to any statement by Mrs Pirbudak that she was breast feeding, this wouldn’t necessarily mean that she didn’t make such a statement, but it could be that the officer failed to write it down. Did you ask for the interpreter to be questioned on the matter, and if not, will you now do so?

Third, you say it isn’t ‘standard procedure’ to allow individuals to communicate with family members while they are at Communications House, but this presumably means that exceptionally calls are allowed, and Mrs Pirbudak says that another detainee was in fact allowed to use the telephone. She says she begged to use the telephone and explained the situation with the carer, without success. Please let me know under what circumstances detainees are permitted to make calls, and whether the IND have any instructions about mothers who need to make arrangements for their children to be looked after?

There are further discrepancies between Mrs Pirbudak’s account of what happened at Yarl’s Wood, and the recital in your letter, which need to be resolved. She doesn’t refer to the doctor, though it could be that the ‘female officer’ who gave her some pills on Friday evening was in fact the doctor. It could be also that the clean shirt and change of underwear she got on Friday evening also arose from the doctor’s instructions. Could you please let me know whether officers at Yarl’s Wood have any instructions about issuing changer of clothing, and whether they are required to give particular attention to the needs of lactating mothers?

You say that removal directions had been cancelled prior to Mrs Pirbudak’s detention, but the record on the computer hadn’t been updated, a matter of concern as you acknowledge. Thus in both the cases I have drawn to your attention, errors were made, resulting in needless anguish and suffering. I pointed out that both these cases came via one solicitor, and it was reasonable to assume that there were others. I have now asked you three times if you will look to see whether there are other cases of a similar nature – most recently in my emailed letter of August 27 – and I now repeat this request for a fourth time.

You tell me that IND staff are currently updating guidance and are reviewing all aspects of the process for effecting family removals. Will you ask the IND to consult on the draft updated guidance, particularly asking for the comments of the Children’s Commissioner before the new guidance is finalised?

Saturday, September 16, 2006

The priory of Castle Acre was surrendered voluntarily to Henry VIII November 22, 1537, and granted by the king to the Duke of Norfolk on December 22, 1537. The monks were given a redundancy payment of £2 and quarterly pensions, the first time this had happened during the Reformation. (G W Bernard, The King's Reformation: Henry VIII and the remaking of the English Church, Yale University Press, 2005, 448) Together with the monastery of Lewes, of which it was the dependent cell, it was the first of the large houses to surrender (ibid, 558)

'Not a single fiftenth century Paston tomb survives', Helen Castor tells us (Blood and Roses, Faber and Faber, 2004,302). But the 17th century tomb of Katherine Knevet makes up for the absence of previous generations, starting up from her elaborate monument on which thereis an inscription by John Donne:

'To the Reviving Memory of the virtuous and right worthy Lady, Dame Katherine Paston, daughter unto the Right Worp'll Sir Thomas Knevitt, Knt, and wife to Sir Edmund Paston, Knight, with whom she lived in wedlock 26 years and had yssue two sonnes yet surviving, vizt. William and Thomas. She departed this life the 10th day of March, 1622, and lyeth here intombed expecting a Joyful Resurrection'

And on the pedestal:

'Can a man be silent and not Praise findFor her that lived the praise of womankindWhose outward frame was sent this world to gessWhat shapes our soules shall weare in happinessWhose vertue did all ill so overswayeThat her whole life was a communion daye.

And on another panel:

'Not that she needeth monument of stone For her well-gotten fame to rest upponBut this was reared to testifie' etc

Several generations earlier - in 1495 - 'the Paston-Heydon feud was decisively consigned to history' as Helen Castor says, when Sir William Paston IV (d February 16, 1544/45) married Bridget Heydon. Their daughter Eleanor Paston (12G grandmother) married Thomas Manners ist Earl of Rutland, and at least her tomb still exists, see earlier posting.

Dr Paul Richards, whose knowledge of Lynn's history is encyclopaedic (see 800 glorious years of King's Lynn history, a Lynn News special publication to mark the 800th anniversary of the town's royal charter, 2005)very kindly showed us some of the town's wonders including the Kontor, a combined warehouse and dormitory constructed by the merchants of the German Hanse in 1475 following the Treaty of Utrecht, February 28, 1474. Edward IV was prepared to make concessions to the Hanse because he intended to invade France and needed to settle disputes with the Hanse arising from his failure to honour the promises he had made to secure their help in regaining the kingdom in 1471. (see Charles Ross, Edward IV, Yale University Press, 1997, 211-212. For the importance of Lynn in trade with the Hanse see T H Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Thank you for your letter of September 7 about the Government’s approach to alcohol misuse. You don’t mention my letter to the Home Secretary of June 25, in which I asked him about his plans for compulsory rehabilitation of drinkers who commit violent crimes, reported in The Observer of June 25, and I enclose a copy for ease of reference. It would be much appreciated if I could have an answer, particularly as the targeted screening and brief interventions, and the possible dedicated referrals for offenders you now refer to in your current letter would increase the demand for alcohol rehabilitation services.

The Government had made no additional funding available to the NHS for this purpose under the Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy, and the £15 million extra you now say is available to Primary Care Trusts from 2007/08 on top of the present £217 million, a mere 6.9%, would represent a trivial increase in real terms after taking into account wage inflation. How much of the £15 million do you estimate is required for the targeted screening and brief interventions, or is there some other money for that purpose? What are the ‘new initiatives to help people who are damaging their health through alcohol abuse’, and do you really think £3.2 million is a sum proportionate to the cost of misuse to society? Is any of the £15 million or the £3.2 million going to be earmarked for services to prisoners, a high proportion of whom are serving sentences for crimes that are connected with alcohol misuse?

On the taxation of alcohol, you repeat the mantra that the Government does not regard this, by itself, as an adequate way to deal with alcohol abuse. Nobody has ever suggested that taxation should be the only means of dealing with the problem, but I certainly challenge your ex cathedra assertion that other instruments such as social legislation and self-regulation are more effective. What evidence do you have for that statement? If the aim is to reduce consumption – and this paragraph of your letter now appears to accept this objective – the social legislation required might have to be quite drastic, as in Finland, for example, and I suggest it would be far more difficult to persuade the British electorate to accept Scandinavian-type restrictions on alcohol, than to apply the price mechanism which they have been used to in previous years.

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has now weighed in with a recommendation that it would be irresponsible to reject. They show that alcohol consumption rose by 20% between 1998 and 2002, from 9.7 to 11.7 litres of pure alcohol per person per year [Pathways to Problems, para 2.26], while among young people aged 16-19, the proportion of males drinking over 50 units a week increased by 80% between 1992 and 2002, and of females, the increase was 400% {para 2.29]. The ACMD say that ‘there is very strong evidence that increasing the price of alcohol reduces consumption overall and may have a disproportionately large effect on consumption by young people’. They recommend that the Government should seriously consider progressively raising the excise duty on alcohol, and this has to mean that it should be raised by an amount sufficient to make alcohol expenditure form a higher proportion of people’s average disposable incomes. What is your answer to their evidence-based proposal?

I am interested to learn that DH officials have participated in working groups preparing the European Union Alcohol Strategy which is to be published next month, but what policies have we been recommending to our EU partners? Will you please lodge copies of the papers we have presented at these working groups in the Library of the House of Lords?

In my letter of July 1, I drew attention to the evidence in the IC Report that the alcohol problem is worse in some other EU member states than in Britain, and suggested that European policy should be to align duties on alcohol upwards throughout Europe. May I please have your comments on that proposal?

From the statistics available to the ACMD, the Government’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy has not achieved the long term aim of reducing the harms caused by alcohol, and as you know perfectly well, ACPO has said that it is far too early to say whether the extension to the licensing hours has had a positive or negative impact on crime and disorder. It is therefore quite unjustifiable for you to couple the reductions in alcohol-related violent crime figures with the Licensing Act, as you do in your final paragraph. Please take heed of the admonition by Chris Allison, ACPO lead on Licensing, in the Press Release, Reference 109/06 of August 2, 2006, ‘ACPO LINE ON THE LICENSING ACT’, that ‘it will be at least a year before we can measure the true impact of the Act, and stop making any claims until you have the evidence.

I did ask the Home Secretary, in my letter of August 2, copy also attached for the web reference of the site where the parameters to be used in the assessment of five areas in which extensions of hours had been granted, and five other control areas in which the hours are unchanged, are being recorded, and I repeat this request.

You say that it would not be practicable to replicate the detailed analysis of the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report on an annual basis, as I suggested (not for the first time) in my letter of August 2, copy also attached. On what other basis do you suggest that the public might assess the overall success of your Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy? Rather than focusing entirely on binge drinking, on which, I reiterate, the ACPO jury is out, lets take the Information Centre for Health and Social Care’s statistics on hospital admissions where there was either a primary or a secondary diagnosis of selected alcohol-related disease as a representative index of alcohol-related harm, referred to in my letter of July 1, but on which you make no comment. [www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/alcoholeng2006/alcoholstatsncopyright/file, Statistics on alcohol, 2006, the Information Centre, June 30, 2006, Table 5.2, p 51] This figure increased from 88.6 thousand in 2000/01 to 126.3 thousand in 2004/05, an increase of 44.25%, and if the cost of alcohol harm went up by that amount since the Interim Analytical Report, it would now have reached £28.5 billion. The outcome of your Government’s so-called Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy would be an increase in the level of harm costing the nation £8.5 billion. I am sure you will have arguments to show that hospital admissions cannot be taken as an index of alcohol harm, but if that is your case, you have an obligation to construct a representative index that will allow the public to judge the success or failure of your policies. Please do so.

Thank you for your letter of July 19 about your intended programme of Home Office reforms, based on six key priorities.

I note that you intend to concentrate especially on drugs-related crime, and I wonder if that includes alcohol-related crime? As you will no doubt recall, the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report for the National Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy of September 2003 estimated that the crime/public disorder costs of alcohol misuse then amounted to £7.3 billion a year, but since, as that Report pointed out, alcohol is widely associated with socialising, relaxing and pleasure, we are reluctant to adopt measures that would interfere with excess consumption. If people drink too much, and then behave in ways that are dangerous to themselves and others, we pick up the pieces half-heartedly, but deliberately avoid tackling the underlying problem. Thus your reform programme mentions alcohol twice: first, in the context of a visit by Patricia Scotland to an existing Drug and Alcohol Treatment Service, and second, where reference is made to the continuation of work with other Departments. There is also a photograph of you with a police officer in Soho, which implies an interest in the phenomenon of late night binge drinking, but nothing more.

The lack of any effective intention to reduce alcohol harm is exemplified by the Government’s failure to update the estimates in the Strategy Unit report, including not only the crime and disorder figure, but the whole of the £20 billion worth of harm to society. If you were genuinely embarking on a programme to reduce this appalling figure, the first thing you would do would be to provide periodic statistics so that you and the public could measure the success of the policies you adopt. In respect of the Licensing Act, it was agreed after a lot of pressure that a ‘robust methodology’ (Patricia Scotland in a letter to me of August 24, 2005) would be used to assess the effects of the Act in five areas where extensions of hours were granted, matched with five areas in which the hours were unchanged. I could find no mention of this assessment on the Home Office website and would be obliged if you could let me have the URL. As a ‘valued partner of the Home Office’ I would also be grateful for replies to my two previous letters on alcohol-related harm, dated June 25 and July 1, copies of which are attached for ease of reference.

Further to my letter of June 25 about alcohol harm, may I please draw your attention to the enclosed BBC item on the report published yesterday by the Information Centre for health and social care (IC), and on the comments made by several experts on the figures.

These alarming figures relate to a period before the Licensing Act came into operation. But it is generally acknowledged that the reason for the increase in harm caused by alcohol is that, as Professor Ian Gilmore says, the stuff is too inexpensive and readily available.

A genuine alcohol harm reduction strategy would not be concerned predominantly with picking up the pieces afterwards, but reducing the consumption of a substance that your own research showed was already causing £20 billion worth of harm in 2000. This report shows that alcohol consumption per capita increased further between 2000 and 2002 (Table 2.17), and that the mean alcohol consumption by secondary school children increased slightly between 2000 and 2005 (Table 3.2). Alcohol-related deaths increased between 2000 and 2004 (Fig 5.2), and hospital admissions where there was either a primary or secondary diagnosis of selected alcohol-related disease increased from 88.6 thousand in 2000/01 to 126.3 thousand in 2004/05 (Table 5.2)

The amount of alcohol-related harm must certainly have increased markedly since the Cabinet Office’s Interim Analytical Report, which produced the figure of £20 billion related to 2000. Why is the Government not willing to produce an annual update of that analysis? Is it because you want to conceal the extent of the strategy’s failure?

The IC report shows that the problem is even worse in some other EU member states. We should seek to align the duties on alcohol upwards throughout the EU, to reduce the harm suffered by all European citizens, and to ensure that differences in alcohol pricing between member states are not an encouragement to smugglers.

An effective strategy for combating alcohol-related harm would mean better coordination between the Home Office, DCMS, ODPM, DH, DEFRA, the FCO and the Treasury. This strategy would not deal only with binge drinking, just because it’s the most noticeable aspect of the problem, but would set out to reduce all dangerous drinking, which affects many more than the highly visible young people vomiting, fighting and passing out in city centres.

Nearly one in four secondary school children aged 11-15 reported that they had drunk alcohol in the past week when surveyed in 2005.

The average amount of alcohol consumed by this age group doubled between 1990 and 2000 and currently remains at 10.4 units (or about 10 small glasses of wine or five pints of beer) per week.

Young adults are the most likely to binge drink - a third of men and a quarter of women aged 16-24 said they had drunk more than double the recommended number of units on one day of the previous week, typically Saturday, when surveyed in 2004.

Rising consumption

In comparison, older adults, aged 45-64, are more likely to drink smaller amounts regularly, on five or more days of the week.

The report also looked at the alcohol consumption levels of the European Union countries, with the UK's four home nations ranked as a group.

Although high, the UK's consumption levels ranked middle against other European Union countries in 2001. Luxembourg topped the table, with its residents drinking an average 17.54 litres per capita per year compared to the UK's 10.39 litres.

But unlike other countries in Europe, the UK's alcohol consumption is still rising. There are serious concerns about the impact of this across the UK.

Professor Denise Lievesley, Chief Executive of The Information Centre, said it was important not to underestimate the effect of alcohol on health.

"By presenting this data we hope that health professionals will be better equipped to put their work in context and to raise awareness of the dangers of alcohol misuse," she said.

Anne Jenkins of Alcohol Concern said the statistics presented "compelling evidence of the devastating impact of excess drinking on the nation's health."

She added: "In 2004, the government laid out a national strategy for tackling alcohol misuse. These statistics underline the need for a major push for the government to meet the targets it set itself."

Regulation

Professor Ian Gilmore of the Royal College of Physicians said: "Whilst today's figures are shocking they are not really surprising."

He questioned whether current measures to reduce alcohol misuse were enough.

"There is going to be a need for regulation. The drivers of alcohol-related health problems are price and availability."

He said alcohol was too inexpensive and readily available in supermarkets around the clock.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: "We know that alcohol misuse has a devastating effect on millions of lives each year. And that is why we are working with the drinks industry, police and health professionals to increase awareness of the dangers of excessive drinking and make the sensible drinking message easier to understand.

"We will also be launching a joint campaign with the Home Office later this year to promote sensible drinking amongst young people."

Shadow Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, said the figures were deeply concerning. "The government's failure to adequately address binge drinking, and ill-thought though 24 hour licensing policy will do nothing to help the situation," he added

"The government must start to prioritise public health and not cut back on rolling out programmes because of deficit problems."

Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/5132856.stm

If The Observer reported you accurately on drinkers who commit violent crimes being forces to undergo rehab treatment, where are you going to find the places?

You say there is no evidence that the extension of drinking hours led to an increase in drink-related crime, and I would be grateful if you could let me know what evidence you have looked at. Since the Government has decided to compare the incidence of crimes of violence against the person, and ambulance call-outs, on or in the vicinity of licenced premises, over a period of a year before and after the Act came into force, you haven’t yet got the figures.

Surely the way to deal with alcohol-related crime is to persuade drinkers to reduce their consumption of alcohol, rather than to pick up the pieces after they have committed offences. Can you point to any measures the Government have taken to reduce drinking?

Presumably the Government take no responsibility for the behaviour of British football fans, who cause trouble everywhere they go in Europe. But they have got into the habit of drinking too much in England, so they do the same when in Stuttgart or wherever. That is the most visible product of successive governments’ failure to develop a genuine and effective alcohol harm reduction strategy, and there are plenty of others, adding up to the £20 billion damage caused in the year 2000, according to the Cabinet Office.

Please don’t tinker with compulsory rehab, but do something positive to combat alcohol harm. Ask Gordon Brown to raise alcohol duties and thus reduce drinking, and campaign for other EU member states to do the same.

Drinkers who commit violent crimes could be forced to undergo rehab treatment, the Home Secretary suggested yesterday amid warnings from senior police officers about the impact of relaxing drinking laws.

John Reid said he was considering whether the fast-tracking of drug addicts into detox to stop them reoffending could be extended to those who offended when drunk. On a visit to police on night duty in Soho he was told by Commander Chris Allison, the Association of Chief Police Officers spokesman on licensing, that he still had 'concerns' about the relaxation in licensing laws.

Reid said there was no evidence that the change had increased drink-related crime as some had predicted, but that he was considering ways of tackling the causes of violence, including drinking. He endorsed schemes to stop addicts reoffending to get money for drugs, and added: 'We don't at the moment have anything similar to that on alcohol but if the drugs intervention proves worthwhile, then we can look at the other driver of violent crime.'

About 40 per cent of crime is thought to be alcohol-related: the arrest of 122 British fans in Germany yesterday drew attention back to British drinking.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Barbara and Hattie's last evening with us, we went on the Eye, and then to an adaptation of Brecht's Galileo at the Gielgud Theatre. Most of the time it was hard to disentangle what was Brecht and what was the adaptation, but in the first Act there were references to Giordano Bruno as an example of what happened to anybody who said the universe was heliocentric. As I remembered it, the heresies for which Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 were more concerned with his espousal of Hermes Trismegistus and the works of Ficino

Hattie went off to Venice yesterday, and Barbara returned to Charlottesville, after spending a few days with us. They realised how much there was to do, and we hope they will come back soon to fill in the blanks, they were such delightful guests.

Friday, September 01, 2006

Had a letter today from the mother of an 18-year old waman who died at Styal Prison in 2003 after taking an overdose, though she was on suicide watch. Staff didn't call medical attention in time, and the inquest found that she had died as a result of a series of failures of the duty of care. When the young woman, S, swallowed an overdose of prescription tablets, it was a clear 'cry for help' yet S was one of six women who died within a few months at Styal. The Chief Inspector or Prisons made nyumerous recommendations, not all of which had been implemented by the end of 2005. But even if the Prison Service had acted promptly and effectively on this report of the Chief Inspector, it wouldn't solve the underlying problem, that it would be impossible for the staff to carry out their duties effectively and humanely with 80,000 people in the system., half of them mentally ill or drug and alcohol abusers. S had psychiatric problems and had been a drug abuser, though at the time of her death it was said that she had been clear for 8 months. Prison is utterly the wrong environment for a vulnerable young woman with these problems, but the Home Office doesn't have any programme for more residential places where they could be given proper treatment. Probably that would be very expensive, but the courts will go on sending them to prison repeatedly if there is no alternative. In the long run this will be even more costly - and inhumane.